The CEFR Companion Volume with New Descriptors (Provisional Edition) is now available. The French version will be published in late autumn. It is intended as a complement to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR). It represents another important step in a process that has been pursued by the Council of Europe since 1971 and owes much to the contributions of members of the language teaching profession across Europe and beyond. The “Companion Volume” is the Council of Europe’s response to requests that have been made by the groups involved in the field of language education to complement the original illustrative scales with more descriptors. In addition to the extended illustrative descriptors, it contains an introduction to the aims and main principles of the CEFR.

Venue: Canadian Centre for Studies and Research on Bilingualism and Language Planning (CCERBAL), Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute (OLBI), University of Ottawa.

Conference dates: May 3-4, 2018.

Deadline for proposals: December 15, 2017.

Featured events: Round tables and thematic symposia on Linguistic Risk-Taking, Bilingual and Multilingual Policies, and much more.

Conference theme: Translanguaging, a construct referring to the complex use of more than one language as a (combined) resource, has captured the imagination of researchers, educators, and policy makers around the world. The role of translanguaging as a linguistic and social practice in family, community, educational and institutional contexts raises a number of stimulating and challenging questions that call for continued discussion.

CORLI is a consortium of Huma - Num, an organization that helps to organize and provide ser- vices for digital humanities in France. CORLI is the consortium for linguistics and includes all aspects of linguistic research and development. As France just joined Clarin as an observer, the objective of our paper is to introduce the con- sortium CORLI to Clarin; CORLI will act as an interface between Clarin and the scientific community of linguists. The goal of CORLI is to help linguists create, use, and disseminate linguistic corpora and digital tools. CORLI has always maintained a policy of providing funding and technological help to fi- nalize and publish corpora issued from a wide range of institutional or personal rese arch pro- jects. CORLI is also involved in recommending and the circulation of guidelines related to re- search and technical practices, especially about linguistic corpora. Finally, CORLI organizes workgroups whose goal is to create and moderate networks that target tools and practices in lin- guistics. These workgroups are organised thematically around topics including metadata, for- mats, tools and practices for corpus exploration, archiving systems, multimodal practices and annotations. Their goal is to help sh owcase innovative work and trends undertaken in research labs and to finalize and disseminate current methods and practices in digital humanities re- search.

Three documents have been developed in the framework of the 2nd World OER Congress. The two documents: Open Educational Resources: From Commitment to Action and the Open Educational Resources: Global Report 2017 provide the outcomes of the six regional consultations and global surveys conducted prior to the 2nd World OER Congress. The third document, Ljubljana OER Action Plan 2017, will be the outcome document of the 2nd World OER Congress and is based on the outputs of the regional consultations, a global online consultation of the document in the months leading up to the Congress and the deliberations of the 2nd World OER Congress. All three documents are complementary and provide a framework for both understanding the current status of OER worldwide and identifying concrete actions to mainstream OER to achieve SDG4.

Researching Writing is perhaps a best fit for an undergraduate research methods course in writing studies, but the text could be a natural addition to an undergraduate TESOL or second language writing theory course to support student inquiry into writing practices. Teachers also might find the text relevant for advanced writing courses for second language writers or cross-cultural composition courses that include an emphasis on inquiry.